Goodbye paper tickets

Sunway Pyramid has penciled in next week for the launch of it’s long awaited Licence Plate Recognition (LPR) system. Now it sounds super cool on the surface but it’s basically a system that makes paper parking tickets redundant by recognizing your vehicles number plate and using that as a sort of timestamp to measure how much your parking fee would be. Okay la, it’s quite cool.

That being said, this whole system will supposedly make entering and exiting it’s carpark complex a seamless experience. Apparently, Sunway Pyramid houses the largest fully integrated licence parking recognition system in Malaysia, with the mall offering multiple means of cashless payment choices for visitors.

It’s great that Sunway Pyramid is positioning itself at the forefront of new technology implementation and all, but we can’t help but to feel that this tech will only alienate the senior citizens who visit the mall. The reality of things is that most senior citizens aren’t exactly tech savvy and a parking system like this could potentially be a turn off for them. Call us stereotypical but try getting a baby boomer to embrace change and you’ll get what we mean.

While conforming to stereotypes about baby boomers is easy (and admittedly quite ignorant), there is actual validity to this. In Penang, senior citizens have already been calling for a non-tech payment option since the implementation of the Penang Smart Parking System. Many senior citizens don’t even own a smartphone and those that do use it mainly to keep in contact with their grandchildren.

Heck, I myself took a while to adopt the whole eWallet thing when it rolled out a few years ago. Of course, Sunway is not going to go fully digital with their parking system just yet (at least we hope not), but it’s a sign of things to come. Will the mall ever go full digital? For the sake of our senior citizens, we hope not.